Among the Dockhands

The following essay examines the congruence of American labor and social history scholarship with actualworking-classexperiences. Particularly, it compares an author's immersion in a masculine working-class environment with recent ideas in historical research about the interplay of gender and work. The author argues that the challenge of working on a fast-paced loading dock with male coworkers was made less onerous by the free expression of working-class male behaviors. Sexual kidding, physical posturing, and profanity, sometimes accentuated with crude but appreciable wit, made the demanding labor more bearable, a theme borne out by recent scholarship on masculinity and the workplace.